After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it.

The choice of service was pretty obvious — while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed.

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice.

identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

is there any Free Software utility for putting those nice logos/images on LightScribe CDs or DVDs? I'm considering buying such a CD/DVD burner, but only if there's open-source software to control the device. I guess burning CDs/DVDs should be no problem using wodim/cdrecord, but adding images as labels on the CD/DVD is likely not possible without special software.

Anyone aware of a Free Software utility for this? Or at least a public specification/datasheet which could be used for creating one? I might even be willing to join development if datasheets are available.

Qi Hardware, founded on the belief in open hardware, produces mass market quality hardware applying free software principles to consumer electronics. The three fundamental elements in our development are copyleft hardware, upstream kernels and community driven software.

Their currently planned setup includes a Linux kernel, u-boot, and OpenWRT as software basis. Personally, I'd like to see a stock Debian running on the hardware sooner or later, of course. The 2GB of flash and 32MB of RAM should be fine for a small Debian system (for instance, my NSLU2 runs off a 1GB thumb drive and has 32MB RAM, and is still very useful).

The code is all GPL'd and available from various git repos, hardware will be CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed, and they try to use Free Software design and development tools also, including KiCAD for schematics and PCB layout, and probably HeeksCAD as CAD tool for mechanical stuff.

I'm really tired of seeing more and more self-proclaimed "Open Hardware" projects that often don't even mention any license for their schematics and PCBs, or use crappy, self-invented "open" licenses that are not even remotely open in any way. Probably even worse, many hardware related projects use closed-source, proprietary electronic design tools such as EAGLE or OrCAD, thereby ruining the whole project from the beginning by forcing everyone who likes to contribute or adapt the hardware to use non-free software. That's why I was really happy to see the Qi people thrive to use open tools from the beginning! I hope to see more hardware projects use KiCAD or gEDA/PCB for their designs in future...

Mailman archives are often only available in the pretty useless "Gzip'd Text" format, which you cannot easily download and view locally (and threaded) in a MUA such as mutt. But that is exactly what I want to do from time to time (e.g. because I want to read the discussions of the past weeks on mailing lists where I'm newly subscribed).

After some searching I found one way to do it which I stripped down to my needs: